Ok, confession time: I was a fan of pro wrestling in high school. Yes, my Monday nights were often flipping between WCW Monday Night and WWF’s Raw is War. Characters like The Rock, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin and Diamond Dallas Page filled my evenings as I ate crappy pizza with my friends. But the thing is, we always just thought it was hilarious. We didn’t really care who won, we didn’t have our favorites, we just thought it was ridiculous that guys in shorts were slapping each other after talking smack to each other over microphones.

There are certainly the diehard fans that pay to see the shows live in arenas, holding up their signs and yelling at the wrestlers they hate, but there are also fans that always saw it as comedy. Perhaps non-wrestling fans never saw it that way, and perhaps they didn’t care. But I really think it could be high quality comedy sometimes.

Witness the below clip from 1987 of Ric Flair, perhaps the greatest wrestler of all-time. In this “interview” in which the interviewer doesn’t ask one question, Flair is a “heel”, essentially a bad guy that has to get the crowd to hate him so that the crowd likes the “face” (the good guy, obviously). Instead of just bragging about how he is going to beat the other guy up, Flair goes all class war on the crowd. He knows that wrestling fans for the most part hate rich people, so he explains how he was born with a golden spoon in his mouth. Yep, a silver spoon was not enough for Flair, he grew up with a golden spoon. To really hammer the point home, he stresses how he “inherited” everything. No one likes a trust fund kid!

But this is only the beginning. As Ric Flair continues to brag about his possessions, barely mentioning his wrestling ability, he gets more and more animated to the point that you wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t just have a heart attack right there. It’s a beautiful crescendo that just builds and builds. The last thirty seconds are just pure bliss as he finally pisses off the crowd (wait for the reaction shot of the mullets!) and well, I don’t want to give it away, because it’s brilliant.

And I dare you to not laugh!

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